The Last of Us: Left Behind

The following review has no spoilers, but it does contain allusions that may lead readers to infer the general nature of specific narrative-critical events. Those who’ve yet to play The Last of Us or this DLC may want to return to this page after they’ve finished both.

Last year, after reporting on games for more than 15 years, I declared that I finally had an answer for anyone who asked me what my favourite game was: Naughty Dog’s brilliant and emotional pandemic adventure The Last of Us.

I haven’t changed my opinion in the nine months since I played.

So it’s only fitting that The Last of Us: Left Behind – the first and final piece of single-player downloadable content for this incredible game – should earn the distinction of being one of the finest game add-ons I’ve ever had the good fortune of downloading.

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Players spent most of their time with The Last of Us controlling the grizzled and grieving Joel, a man whose method of dealing with a fungal plague that stole everything from him was to stop caring.

In contrast, Left Behind puts us in control of his companion, the brave, young Ellie.

Set in the middle of the original game’s epic apocalyptic adventure, the DLC fills in the narrative hole that had players wondering how Ellie managed to save Joel’s life after he was grievously injured from a bad fall. We get to see how she scoured a mall, fighting off humans and infected to find the medical supplies necessary to save her friend.

But that’s just dressing for what this clever and emotionally gratifying add-on really wants to do, which is to dig into Ellie’s character and more deeply explore the terrible tragedy of being young at the end of the world.

Investigating the broken down mall for supplies, Ellie begins having flashbacks to another dilapidated shopping centre she explored with a friend of hers not long before she left on her journey with Joel. This is clearly the heart of the story Naughty Dog’s writers want to tell.

Ellie’s mall adventure to save Joel is terrifying, leading players through a handful of tense encounters that allow players to make use of nearly all of the original game’s satisfying combat and crafting mechanics (don’t worry, the designers have speckled the action with helpful on-screen tips for anyone who may have forgotten how to play – though it’s still pretty tough).

But her flashback escapades are different. They’re simply about kids trying to be kids – albeit in a much crappier world than the one their parents grew up in.

She and her friend Riley do the sorts of things any kids their age would want to do at the mall, just with more depressing results. They use a photo booth that malfunctions. They ride a carousel that quits halfway through. And, in a particularly moving scene, they pretend they’re playing a broken arcade fighting game. It’s an ode to the enduring power of kids’ imaginations.

But ideas even more profound are at work behind these lighthearted scenes, and they don’t reveal themselves until later on.

It’s not until the final moments of the flashback that players who completed the original game will fully understand the significance of events in the DLC. It may seem like a cliffhanger at first, but only until you think things through to their logical, disquieting conclusion.

After setting down my controller and thinking about it, I decided that imagining what was to happen next was probably worse than actually seeing it play out on the screen, and I damn near cried.

Suffice to say Left Behind‘s narrative is close to faultless. It’s a beautiful tale wonderfully told and expertly performed.

And the action is every bit as scary and immersive as it was in the original game.

The only thing keeping me from giving Left Behind a perfect score is its brevity. At just three hours it is tantalizingly, teasingly short. I’d just become re-immersed in this stunning world and re-acquainted with its haunting characters…and then it ended.

Of course, this is less a criticism of the DLC and more a reflection of my desire to revisit a game that affected me like no other.

Naughty Dog hasn’t said whether it’s going to produce a sequel. If Left Behind does end up our final goodbye to the fungal apocalypse, then The Last of Us will end as it began: A deeply unnerving yet marvelously moving interactive entertainment.

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